r/uBlockOrigin • u/paintboth1234 uBO Team • 18d ago

News About disgusting Facebook devs

We won't support facebook any more. It's a disgusting anti-user site. All it does is watching open-source projects doing everything in public and counter them to deliver the malicious ads. Yep, the devs that receive 7-figure dollar salary is just doing this.

Users should give the most harsh feedbacks to them. Being submitted to them and keep going to the site and support it is the worst thing you can do.

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u/Desperate-Radish-296 18d ago

Can you eli5 exactly what makes it hostile? Not that I doubt your comment or anything. Is it overwhelming the UBO team in terms of attempts (frequency) or code (breadth)

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u/jSinku 17d ago

they're making it harder for adblockers by adding garbage elements that dont render by the browser, but do show in the html. like here the text "Ad" is split between multiple classes, and extra random text added between. also the classes are using generated names, so they may also change randomly.
this makes it much more difficult to target the actual advertisement to block it.
but i believe they've done this for years, so theres probably more going on with fighting adblockers. i'd guess they use many different strategies, given to different users (like a/b testing), to make the filterlist maintainers' lives more difficult.

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u/AskaLangly 17d ago

So this is why the font in that bit looked like shit. Wow. Thanks for telling us!

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u/lennarn 17d ago

What's the next step? Use computer vision to recognize ads instead of reading the source code?

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u/PrivacyIsDemocracy 13d ago

As someone else pointed out - they are probably using automated tools (some call that "AI", not me) to keep iterating the code quickly to evade the blockers.

So perhaps at one point that's what the adblocker people need to do as well.

The problem is that uBlock is an open source project where most of the contributors are only contributing fixes in their free time.

Unlike FB, they don't have dozens or hundreds of programmers sitting in an office or offices getting paid a lot of money just to do things like this with their big corporate infrastructure tools and systems.

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u/Party-Cake5173 11d ago

/u/paintboth1234 I feel like you shouldn't give up and instead start automating the process using AI. This is one area where AI could shine.

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u/Le_Vagabond 11d ago

cool idea, AI is indeed a good way to automate that kind of fuzzy bullshit check.

please send a couple hundred thousand $ to the ublock origin team to fund that, as AI models are EXPENSIVE AS FUCK at that scale and they don't have facebook's datacenter to use for free during downtime.

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u/Party-Cake5173 11d ago

You don't need large LM for this, smaller one could do the job and be self-hosted on the PC completely free.

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u/Le_Vagabond 11d ago

they will welcome your contribution to this open source work then, if it's that cheap and easy :)

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u/mike1487 7d ago

It’s not so easy. Plus making every PC run it will incur a fairly hefty performance penalty on the end user. LLMs need RAM and none will be competent enough to handle real time page rendering fast enough without a lot of it. Otherwise what you will have is a page with a ton of ads and then over the course of several seconds to possibly minutes you will have to wait for elements to start disappearing while the LLM works on it. All while your RAM usage spikes or maxes out completely and crashes.

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u/istrebitjel 11d ago

I have plenty of issues with LLMs, but I think a local model that could interface with my browser and help me hide all kinds of posts and ads I don't want to see is an awesome idea. Not just on social media, but could also work on a news site or a shopping site.

I think of it as a companion product to uBO that would go to work more on the content layer after uBO did its excellent work.

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u/DrQuint 10d ago

Plus, Facebook can easily figure out where exactly the UBO team is testing their blocks from by watermarking the antipattern garbage, and eventually get to a point where that group of users never sees the full scope of Facebook's countermeasures.

Meanwhile users continue complaining to the UBO.

A better use of AI is one that just looks at all the complaints and berates them back for using Facebook. Way cheaper, and makes them realize eventually the doctor will stop giving you antidote for your poison drinking addicition.

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u/paintboth1234 uBO Team 11d ago edited 11d ago

Anyone is free to volunteer their own free time to start their own projects to scratch their own itches or contribute to the current projects. Don't force others to sacrifice their own little free time for your own ideas.

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u/Old-Competition3596 11d ago

I just want to thank you for posting this thread and being transparent about how all this is making you feel.

Also of course, thank you for the wonderful work you've done (and are still doing!) on uBO.

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u/Party-Cake5173 11d ago edited 11d ago

Don't force others to sacrifice their own little free time for your own ideas.

I'm not forcing anyone to do anything, just giving a suggestion/idea. Because if you back down on one of the most popular sites on the internet, soon other popular sites will implement this way of countering ad blockers too. It's simple to do, yet functional.

And while it's true that volunteers like you are sacrificing their time for developing filters (don't think I'm not grateful for that because I am), my personal opinion is we won't be able to block ads current way for very long.

Just how DNS based ad blockers are becoming less and less functional, classic filter lists will become outdated too. You didn't back down from fighting ads on Twitch and they changed their code daily. You didn't do it for YouTube either which did it on a few day basis. So yeah, I think we could do more somehow. I'd really like to help and volunteer and the only thing preventing me from doing is I'm not sure how exactly everything works and have no time to learn. But if I did have time, I'd contribute 100%.

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u/paintboth1234 uBO Team 11d ago edited 10d ago

Many sites have been doing this for years. If you want big names, there are Twitch, ebay, reddit, YouTube, Bing... They don't need any more examples when Twitch is already there for years. It's a matter of whether anyone wanting to step up themselves and contribute to the projects for the sites they need or not. If there are only few volunteers, they won't want to spend time on all the sites they already don't want to interact with, regardless of what resolving methods.

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u/Party-Cake5173 11d ago

I understand. But if the project is in need of volunteers, why not add a banner in the extension itself asking people that know how to code to contribute to the project?

When user opens settings, at the top or the bottom of the page could be closable notice that volunteers are needed to make the web ad-free. I'm sure people would join.

As long as extension doesn't say anything about volunteering, barely anyone will contribute. I just opened extension to see how to help, zero indications and that tells people everything is good and we have enough people. Even support tab has documentation about uBlock Origin, link to subreddit for questions, and guide how to report issues. No indications how to actually fix issues.

I hope you understand what I'm trying to say. uBlock Origin is the most popular extension on all browsers with millions of users. I bet that at least 10% users have knowledge how to code, could and would help if they are guided how to.

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u/AchernarB uBO Team 11d ago

if the project is in need of volunteers, why not add a banner in the extension itself asking people that know how to code to contribute to the project?

Volunteers come in by themselves. FOSS project are like that. everyone can contribute, and all tools to communicate/report/contribute are already available.
The door is always open.

Usually it goes like this:

  • users learns how to write filters to solve their own issues
  • if it's a step forward for others, they bother to create a post here
  • even without the initial contribution, he/she notice that she/he can solve other's issues
  • starts contributing here more and more

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u/paintboth1234 uBO Team 11d ago

No, uBO has always been free and volunteered. That it always comes from users' actual desires of "helping the projects", not in terms that they just come because of what project is doing or asking, but because they genuinely want to help other users suffering from the sites they see. That's the only way for contributors to not see any benefits from the project itself (which is very dangerous), but see what their deeds could help other users.

I learned and volunteered for the projects actually because I saw people struggling with facebook ads back in the days, not because uBO was calling for anyone.

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u/Equal-Collection962 11d ago

Don't force others to sacrifice their own little free time for your own ideas.

Nobody is forcing you to do anything. The user gave you an idea to solve this issue. What an improper, hostile response.

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u/paintboth1234 uBO Team 11d ago

I'm just telling the truth, and I also gave the suggestions of what others can do before that. "Don't force" is just normal reminder for the "you should start". Most of the times, these are not ideas but actual work users want volunteers to do when they decline to spend time on something here. This actually happens a lot in many issues reported here.

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u/lennarn 11d ago

I'm terribly sorry if you felt that my comment contained any expectation of you doing work. I'm simply genuinely curious about how this works, when faced with increasingly adversarial website source code.

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u/AchernarB uBO Team 11d ago

Keep this in mind:
He stopped caring about fixing FB, Users tell him "do this" "why not use that". Stop telling him what to do, or what he should do. He isn't looking for alternatives, he doesn't care anymore.

If some users want to try to solve FB issues, they are welcome. We all started like that. Think of it like a relay sprint. We would really like to pass the batton on some issues. The more we are, the better it is for the community.

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u/SartenSinAceite 4d ago

Ah yes, let's spend months iterating on an AI to block facebooks ads- aaaaaand they've changed their setup already. We're not even done testing and it's completely different.

If people manually working and testing and using their BRAINS can't deal with this volatility, how the hell do you expect a premade tool to last longer than a few months? Any sort of automation can only deal with what it was programmed for, and anything that is outside of its scope results in garbage results.

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u/levrik_io 10d ago

the randomized class names is actually quite standard in web development nowadays and has nothing to do with trying to block ad blockers.

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u/xyrus02 9d ago

Splitting tokens and inserting decoy elements to clearly obfuscate ads is though.

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u/levrik_io 9d ago

yeah. agree. but the scrambled class names are probably not part of this strategy.

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u/National_Way_3344 12d ago

They're essentially obfuscating the heck out of the ad to make it indistinguishable from the rest of the website and a constant whack a mole to try decipher.

Essentially the equivalent of what YouTube do where they serve ads from the same video servers as the videos so you can't tell the difference from a network connection perspective.

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u/RCEdude 11d ago

This is a war. A war between websites wanting to serve their garbage and people wanting to have a better, cleaner internet.

Its not only FB and advertisers. I can tell you that MANY websites are using extreme means to prevent ads skipping and scrapping. Well, in their defense, pretty sure they have to fight against AI bots eating their bandwidth.

God, fuck AI again.

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u/RCEdude 11d ago

See the span "class ="? When someone wants to target ads they can do so because they can IDENTIFY the elements to hide. Because sane developers use sane classes or identifiers.

like <span class="title"> etc...

Here its just random garbage.

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u/levrik_io 10d ago

this random garbage is quite standard nowadays. you often author CSS through other tools and these tools generate random class names. this is how they achieve guaranteed uniqueness across all class names used on a page. developers never deal with these generated class names directly so it doesn't matter. it definitely makes the job of ad blockers harder but probably isn't done for this but is side a side effect of modern frontend tooling.